I created Mom's Cancer, which won an Eisner Award and was published by Abrams. Other honors included a Harvey Award and the German Youth Literature Prize. My second book, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, was nominated for Eisner and Harvey awards and won the American Astronautical Society's Emme Award. Recently did an Eisner-nominated webcomic, "The Last Mechanical Monster." I'm grateful.

Friday, July 28, 2017

I had a comment/reply on my "Last Mechanical Monster" webcomic, currently running on GoComics.com, I thought was interesting enough to share. (Background info: my story is a sequel to a 75-year-old Superman cartoon.) A reader questioned a drawing in which I showed my Robot full of gears, saying gears'd be too heavy and slow. My reply is a good example of how I approach a story:

"(That's) something I actually spent quite a lot of time mulling over before I even began 'The Last Mechanical Monster': How does the Robot work? I thought hard and seriously about it for some time, drew a lot of diagrams, and decided it simply can’t, especially with a mostly hollow chest cavity (as shown in the Fleischer cartoon). There’s no way to attach the arms, no place to put a motor for its neck-propeller, no room for an engine or batteries, etc.

"Basically I had to decide if I was telling a science fiction story or a fantasy story (I think it’s fair to say Superman himself could go either way), and the total impossibility of the Robot convinced me I was writing fantasy. If this were science fiction, I wouldn’t have filled his chest with gears; since it’s fantasy, and I thought gears looked cool and fit with some themes I develop later in the story, I went for it.

"Think of the gears less as a way to move a robot and more as a metaphor to reveal a character."